Fabio Zaffagnini and his team in Italy took inspiration from Jack Black’s School of Rock, raised $50,000 and pulled off a mass singalong that went viral and is set to bring Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters to their small town of Cesena

Fabio Zaffagnini during the concert he organised of 1,000 musicians playing Foo Fighters’ Learn to Fly.
Photograph: Andrea Bardi

Fabio Zaffagnini and his team in Italy took inspiration from Jack Black’s School of Rock, raised $50,000 and pulled off a mass singalong that went viral and is set to bring Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters to their small town of Cesena

Fabio Zaffagnini can barely believe the amount of attention he’s garnered. “We’re replying to thousands of emails,” he says from the tiny town of Cesena, Italy (located just east of Florence). “Every time I go outside and walk down the street, everyone’s coming up to me with hugs and thanks for what me and the rest of the team did.”

What Zaffagnini and company accomplished was an astounding confluence of logistics a full year in the making by organizing 1,000 musicians to play the Foo Fighters’ Grammy-nominated track from 1999, Learn to Fly, in unison, all in a bid to woo Dave Grohl and his bandmates to perform in their part of the world.

The plan was first hatched last year as Zaffagnini was taking a drive.

“I was listening to a Foo Fighters song on the radio and thought it’d be very cool to see them in my city,” says Zaffagnini, whose day job is running a start-up dubbed Trail Me Up that maps out views of hiking trails.

“I thought they’d never come to Cesena, since the Foo Fighters are so big and my city is so small. So I wanted to do something special to impress them.”

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After wracking his brain, Zaffagnini took inspiration from the unlikeliest of places: the 2003 Jack Black comedy School of Rock. “On the DVD, there’s a bonus feature where he says if you really want something, you have to ask – and it works better if there are a thousand people screaming behind you.” (Black and director Richard Linklater were seeking permission to use a Led Zepplin song in the film, so they shot a plea video during a concert and the band soon relented.)

Heeding Black’s advice, Zaffagnini immediately started planning the monumental performance: a process that took up the entirety of his nights and weekends for the past year. First came putting together a team that could help him with logistics, then came the launch of a crowdfunding site to pay for expenses and equipment. After raising nearly $50,000, the team next tackled the task of recruiting musicians, asking prospective participants to send in audition videos of themselves playing (they had to be good enough to play in unison, after all).

Throughout the process, Zaffagnini says he ran into countless roadblocks.

“We had to overcome many problems through the year,” he notes of the issues certainly not helped by Italy’s weak economy. “Making something like this in Italy is very hard. We’re not used to thinking big and we’re facing a huge crisis – not just economical, but something that involves our view of the world and the future.”

We think these kind of things can happen in other countries, but not Italy. The US is a place where dreams come true and Italy’s not, so every time we’d tell sponsors or musicians about the idea, they’d say it was cool but it’d never happen.”

However, Zaffagnini and his team stayed true to their vision, which meant turning an otherwise empty local park into a performance space prepped for a thousand people for the day. “There was absolutely nothing there,” he notes of the magnitude of hosting so many. “All of the toilets, structures, instruments, microphones, cables, and electricity had to be brought in.”

When the day finally arrived to shoot the video and a year of work was about to come to fruition, Zaffagnini was more exhausted than nervous. “We didn’t sleep in the days leading up to it trying to prepare,” he said. Once everyone got into place and the hundreds of drummers started rehearsing in unison – using a click-track – Zaffagnini realized they were on to something special. “After a few rehearsals, we looked at each other and said, ‘Hey, this will actually work.’”

Once the video was shot and the team saw it for the first time, Zaffagnini couldn’t help but weep. “Yeah, I started crying like a baby,” he admits.

“I’m not an emotional person, but so much went into it.”

When it finally hit the web last week, not only did the clip become a worldwide smash that quickly skyrocketed to 18 million views and counting, but Grohl himself responded with a promise to play in Cesena in the future.

“I thought it was a joke when I first saw it,” he says of Grohl’s homemade video in which he speaks to Zaffagnini and his team in Italian. “When I realized it was him, I started crying again! I don’t cry often, but it’s been very hard to contain the emotions I’ve had.”

Inspired by their success, Zaffagini hints at more projects in the future. But for right now, he’s enjoying everything coming his way. “These numbers are so big that I can’t wrap my mind around them,” he says with a laugh.

“I’ve been completely overwhelmed by everything. I feel very proud and I would like to thank everyone that gave us a hand. This is something that could be life changing for all of us.”